Approach and Innovation Potential ‘Pre-modern Period’

The agenda of a different aesthetics is based on the following working hypothesis: alternative conceptions of the aesthetic can best be identified with an approach which is not dominated by explicit aesthetic theory or meta-level discourses on aesthetics. Consequently, the research proposal is ‘different’ in three ways:

The times that the chosen approach has to be tested on are mainly those which do not draw upon a codified aesthetic macro-theory. Pragmatically, these times can be subsumed under the heuristically applied collective term ‘pre-modern period’, which includes, among others, parts of Greek and Roman Antiquity and the European Middle Ages with their vernacular literatures. It is not our aim to reconstruct a prior history of modern aesthetic theory in the sense of an ‘incubation period’. Instead, we ask whether the ‘differing’ material from these times does not rather point to different assertions and notions concerning the aesthetic and its functions. In the first funding phase, the focus deliberately rests on the pre-modern European cultural landscape. The originality of this first task consists in recognising the ‘other’ within ‘one’s own’; inter- and transculturally, this could certainly also open up new areas of intersection with non-European cultures.

When seeking ‘different’ aesthetics, it is important to know which sources and objects should be taken into account in order to establish a perspective that goes beyond traditional aesthetic theory. We are looking for testimonies, forms and constellations in which aesthetic comments emerge through the realisation and implementation of texts and images, music and objects, or institutional practices and cultural representations. Hereby, aesthetic practices and manifestations which do not explicitly display their artificiality also will be given special consideration. In this way, we include areas, passages, hints and traces in which aesthetic questions and the potential for aesthetic reflection are developed only rudimentarily, such as specialist texts, functional objects or religious didactic writings. Precisely by considering these seemingly unspectacular fields embedded in contexts quite different from ‘aesthetic’ concerns, we hope to be able to trace the aesthetic ‘rules of the game’ in their shifting, context-related variations. Thus, aesthetic criteria should become identifiable by using a more complex approach than has been available so far.

If one takes evidence from the pre-modern period as the point of departure, one encounters acts and artefacts which are usually embedded in social activities (such as mercantile or socio-political representations, religious instruction, language standardisation, everyday contexts). Thus, pre-modern ‘aesthetic’ acts and artefacts often clearly refer to everyday living environments. Technical knowledge about artistic composition and multidimensional, society-related functions are shown to be closely interdependent. The task of the research programme can be described as uncovering the meanings of this relationship, while neither losing sight of the inner logic of artistic processes and techniques nor of social functions.